Double Jeopardyby Kevin Crowe

Genre:DramaSwearwords: Some strong ones.Description:Wearing the pink triangle in a Nazi Concentration camp.

Sometimes I recall with bitterness and nostalgia those heady few years in Berlin. After graduating from university with a degree in engineering I got a job in the city and I spent many evenings cruising Schoneberg, exploring the bars and bathhouses, seeking my pleasures promiscuously. We were so naïve: we thought the party would never end and that love, or at least lust, would last for ever. The kaleidoscope of colour and sound, dancing and music, was as intoxicating as the strongest liquor. Soldiers, labourers, teachers, civil servants, students; poets, musicians and artists; yes, even engineers like me: we mingled, spoke the same language, were looking for the same things. It was as close to a classless society as it is possible to imagine.

I mustn't idealise it. There were pickpockets, blackmailers, those who abused the young and other lawless elements. Of course there were: criminals are always found where people congregate for pleasure and company. Paragraph 175 of the penal code still outlawed us and our activities, but it was so rarely enforced, we could almost be forgiven for thinking it didn't exist. Almost.

We weren't just naïve, we were complacent. We were unprepared when the Weimar Republic was replaced by the Third Reich, and at first few noticed much difference, except perhaps that the streets seemed a little safer, something that was to prove an illusion. Gradually rumours began circulating and familiar faces disappeared. By the time our bars, clubs and bathhouses were closed I, along with many others, had deserted Schoneberg. It didn't stop us eventually ending up in the camps.

I suppose I was one of the lucky ones: I was one of the survivors. For nine years I was in concentration camps, including the notorious Buchenwald where we were forced to help build weapons of war. I survived the camps.

I’m not proud of being a survivor.

Nor am I ashamed: I have nothing to be ashamed of. Unlike the capos – prisoners turned guards – I didn’t kill or hurt or abuse anyone. I couldn’t have been a capo anyway: they were mainly criminals and political prisoners. Queers, like the Jews, were the bottom of the pile, the most despised – even by the other prisoners.

I survived by offering my body to the capos and the guards. If that shocks you, so be it. If you wish to judge me, go ahead: I'd rather be judged than die a slow death in the camps, malnourished, beaten and worked to death. They had a phrase for what happened to so many of us queers, to describe what they did to us: extermination through labour.

For a while, I was the boy of a senior capo who made sure I got extra rations and lighter work, including a stint as a clerk, in exchange for using my body. He was a bit of a wheeler and dealer, and managed to smuggle beer, tobacco and chocolate into the camp and the SS guards were bribed by him to turn a blind eye. Of course, none of this contraband was for the use of prisoners, especially not for us queers. Even for a capo, it was dangerous to have a boy, and I could have reported him to the commandant or boasted about him. I never did. He would have lost his post and probably been made to wear the pink triangle, but I would have lost a lot more. My silence earned me a tiny bit of the contraband.

Most of the time I was at the mercy of whichever capo or guard wanted some release. Sometimes I would service one of them for days or even weeks; other times it would be different ones every day. I had no say in the matter. Because I was young and did my best to keep in trim – and had a reputation for silence, I was often their first choice.

They weren’t queers, of course. Even the senior capo who made me his regular boywasn’t one of us: he made it clear he would prefer a woman. Some of those I serviced would get nasty after they’d come, calling me names and beating me. The more sadistic ones took pleasure in hurting me and then forcing me back to the extermination through labour gangs. But most of the time I did benefit, though always at the whim of those I serviced.

Sometimes there would be arguments and occasionally fights over who got me. Once, I ended up in solitary confinement as a result of such an argument, when a guard pulled rank on a capo. Despite me having no control over who had me, the capo got his revenge by finding an excuse to punish me.

It was a trivial misdemeanour: he accused me of insolence, and any accusation was proof of guilt. I was taken down to the cellars and locked in a tiny cell, without food, water or light. It was while I was there I witnessed the torture of a pastor. Fortunately, the torturers didn’t know I was there, otherwise I doubt I would be alive now. I cowered in a corner of the cell, while watching in horror, relieved that the only light came from the torches carried by the guards.

The pastor was brought down by three drunken guards who were determined to get even drunker while having some fun at the expense of the queer priest. It was always rough for all us homosexuals, but the priests had it particularly bad. I'd overheard some of the capos and guards talking about queer priests, saying things like they'd betrayed their calling and their God, they were even worse than the rest of us, they were hypocrites who used their authority to get others to commit immoral acts with them. I doubt many queer priests survived.

He was dressed in clerical clothes, something that was most unusual. I could only think the guards had dressed him in the outfit as part of their game. I knew him slightly: he was quiet and inoffensive and did his best to keep out of the way of the capos and guards. His fear of standing out from the crowd was such that, if approached by any of the few queers who were religious, he would wave them away in a futile attempt to deny his profession, like St Peter denying he was one of Christ's apostles. It was pointless: everyone knew what he was.

They stripped him and tied his feet and hands to a wooden post, his hands clasped as if in prayer. One of them poured some boiling water into a bowl, which they then held to his crotch so his testicles were resting in the water. His screams ricocheted around the cellar. After a few more gulps of booze, they replaced the bowl of boiling water with one of melted ice and for some time they kept alternating the two bowls. Strands of skin were hanging from his sac and the stink of scalded flesh hung in the air.

They got bored of the game. They sat on a bench, swigging from bottles, and staring at the barely conscious pastor. One of them said to the others: “Hey, these queers like it up the arse, don’t they? Well, let’s give him what he wants.” He cut the rope that attached the pastor’s hands to the post, while leaving his feet tied, so he fell forward, banging his head on the stone floor. A sickening thudding sound echoed around the walls. Another guard grabbed a broom handle and thrust it into the priest. He was by then too weak to cry out, only whimpers escaping from his mouth as he gradually lost consciousness. The guards finished their liquor, smashed the neck of one of bottles then stabbed the pastor’s throat with it, leaving him to bleed to death. Later some prisoners came to remove his body. I don’t know what happened to those prisoners, but I never saw them again.

During all this, I was praying I wouldn’t be seen. The bile I stopped myself from retching was burning my throat. Only when the guards had left did I bring up what little was in my stomach.

You probably want to see the numbers tattooed on my arm. I’ll have to disappoint you: I was never tattooed. In most camps, prisoners weren’t, although they were in Auschwitz. All prisoners had to have a triangle sewn into their clothes, the colour of which determined why they were there. Homosexuals had to wear a pink triangle so we could never hide what we were.

I remember the day the women came to our camp. Most of the prisoners looked atthem, drooling: it had been years since many of them had even seen a woman, but they were to be disappointed: the women weren’t there for them: they were for us.

The Nazis had this idea they could make us normal. After all, they thought, surely any man – even a queer – would realise what he had been missing when presented with a naked young woman with her legs open wide. Once he’d experienced real normal sex, he wouldn’t want to go back to what he was. Surely.

There weren’t enough women for all the queers, so we had to queue up to wait our turn. The commandant had insisted on spy holes being drilled in the wall of the dormitory so he could keep an eye on us. He wanked himself whilst watching the women – those of us queueing saw him. This was nothing new: he used to watch us being whipped whilst strapped to the wooden horse, and he would have his hand down his trousers.

All the women were Jews. They had been told if they got the queers to fuck them and to come, they would be given their freedom. If they failed, they’d be sent to Auschwitz. Of course, they all probably ended up in the gas chambers anyway. Perhaps the women were naïve or just clutching at straws. I doubt they had any choice in the matter.

I don’t know what the Party expected. We were all undernourished – even those few of us who serviced the capos and guards. None of us fancied women, otherwise we wouldn’t have been wearing the pink triangle in the first place. Add to that the pressure of knowing we and the women would be punished if we didn’t perform and the knowledge we were being spied on, it was hardly a surprise the experiment failed. A few – a tiny few – of us managed it. I threw up afterwards.

There were reprisals. We got no sympathy, not from the guards or capos or from other prisoners, particularly as none of them had been allowed near the women. One of the other prisoners – he wore the red triangle, so was a political – grabbed me and spat in my face. “I despise the fascists,” he said, “but I despise queers even more. When Stalin’s army liberates us, the only laws of Hitler we’ll keep are those against the perverts.”

I was lucky: I had managed to perform, so I was one of the few pink triangle men not to be punished. However, I had to stand to attention, without moving or flinching, whilst the punishments took place.

It was snowing, great thick flakes of the stuff. All I had was a thin worn jacket andpatched and torn trousers. At least I had some covering against the freezing temperature.

Those who were to be punished were told to strip, and leave their clothes on the wetground. They were then forced to lie face down across the rows of wooden horses arrayed in the yard and their hands and feet were tied to the contraptions. They were each given twenty five lashes across the buttocks, legs and back with whips made of knotted horsehair. As they were whipped, they had to shout out the number of strokes they had received. If they lost count, or the guards claimed not to have heard them, the beatings started again from number one. After the guards had finished, the men were left tied to the wooden horses, bleeding, as the snow fell on their naked bodies. Eventually they were released, and they crawled and staggered to the dormitory.

I knew the pain they felt. I too had been tied to the horse and whipped. I would spend all day on my knees blowing any number of capos and guards to avoid that.

Every day pink triangle prisoners died. As its name suggests, the extermination through labour programme was planned that way. All the work was heavy, tedious, tortuous and often pointless. In one camp, we had to dig a pit, removing all the rock and soil, and build a hill from it. When the pit got too deep and the hill too high to push the barrows, we did the whole thing in reverse, rock by rock until both the pit and the hill were gone. In another camp we had to dig rocks in order to build walls so the guards could have target practice. They would start shooting while walls were still being built, sometimes not caring if they hit prisoners, other times deliberately aiming at us. Sometimes the work would be nominally useful, such as clearing ground for vegetable patches that nothing was ever planted in or for roads that were rarely laid. At Buchenwald we helped with munitions production.

Perhaps you are wondering how the Nazis identified us as homosexuals – after all, most of us passed as normal for most of our lives, and we no longer congregated in Schoneberg. Some of us were the victims of informers – neighbours, relations, work mates. Some had been arrested when our meeting places were raided and closed down. There were many ways we were caught.

In my case, it was entrapment. I went to a park known as a cruising area, and this young handsome man gave me the eye. As soon as I touched him, I was arrested. He was an SS officer whose job was to entice homosexuals and then take them into custody. You know the rest.

When the camps were liberated, I wanted to leave Germany: there were too manymemories. My English was good, as you can hear, and engineers can work anywhere. I spent a few months in a Displaced Persons Camp where I became friendly with a British official. He helped me get the papers that allowed me to work in your country.

That was fifteen years ago, and ever since I have lived and worked in the country of my liberators. People assumed I had been in a camp because I was a Jew and I didn’t disabuse them. I have taken pleasure from my work as an engineer, helping the country that liberated me to get back on its feet after the war. I have built a life for myself here, I have made friends and I have even got used to your beer. I have enjoyed the years I have lived in your country.

That is, until now, until this feeling of déjà vu, following my attempt to pick up a young handsome man who turned out to be a police officer in plain clothes whose job it was to entrap homosexuals and then take them into custody.

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About the Author

​Born in Manchester in 1951, Kevin Crowe has lived in the Highlands since 1999. A writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, he has had his work published in various magazines, journals and websites. He also writes regularly for the Highland monthly community magazine Am Bratach and for the Highland LGBT magazine UnDividing Lines.